Information-Theoretically Secret Key Generation for Fading Wireless Channels

By Chunxuan Ye, Suhas Mathur, Alex Reznik, Yogendra Shah, Wade Trappe, Narayan B. Mandayam. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2009

445 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The multipath-rich wireless environment associated with typical wireless usage scenarios is characterized by a fading channel response that is time-varying, location-sensitive, and uniquely shared by a given transmitter-receiver pair. The complexity associated with a richly scattering environment implies that the short-term fading process is inherently hard to predict and best modeled stochastically, with rapid decorrelation properties in space, time, and frequency. In this paper, we demonstrate how the channel state between a wireless transmitter and receiver can be used as the basis for building practical secret key generation protocols between two entities. We begin by presenting a scheme based on level crossings of the fading process, which is well-suited for the Rayleigh and Rician fading models associated with a richly scattering environment. Our level crossing algorithm is simple, and incorporates a self-authenticating mechanism to prevent adversarial manipulation of message exchanges during the protocol. Since the level crossing algorithm is best suited for fading processes that exhibit symmetry in their underlying distribution, we present a second and more powerful approach that is suited for more general channel state distributions. This second approach is motivated by observations from quantizing jointly Gaussian processes, but exploits empirical measurements to set quantization boundaries and a heuristic log likelihood ratio estimate to achieve an improved secret key generation rate. We validate both proposed protocols through experimentations using a customized 802.11a platform, and show for the typical WiFi channel that reliable secret key establishment can be accomplished at rates on the order of 10 b/s.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6664c11d7bc3e410230e6550481befd1499cb5d1

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Citations in the corpus

Classifications and Applications of Physical Layer Security Techniques for Confidentiality: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “communicating parties (Alice and Bob) was studied in [181].”
Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey (2010, background): “ween the legitimate nodes, with secrecy achieved when the eavesdropper lacks channel state information [189], • exploiting the level crossing rates of the fading processes at the legitimate terminals [190], • inducing more rapid ﬂuctuations in channels from which keys are to be extracted via transmi”